If transporters get messed up by radioactive rocks... does this mean they can't transport, say, an anti-matter shooting hovertank or something? How about that dune buggy in ST: Nemesis?

I ask because I'm wondering if the Federation and other equivalent powers have troop transport ships that just beam down a whole battalion of space-troopers with space-tanks and ruin their opponents' shit (after orbitally precision-blasting jamming devices) instead of "slowly" dropping them via runabouts and shuttles and other landing crafts?

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:If transporters get messed up by radioactive rocks... does this mean they can't transport, say, an anti-matter shooting hovertank or something? How about that dune buggy in ST: Nemesis?

I ask because I'm wondering if the Federation and other equivalent powers have troop transport ships that just beam down a whole battalion of space-troopers with space-tanks and ruin their opponents' shit (after orbitally precision-blasting jamming devices) instead of "slowly" dropping them via runabouts and shuttles and other landing crafts?

We also know that they do have specialized ships, such as the Holoship, which was equipped with 14 long range transporters, and was meant to transport people en masse. Though, these were meant to be sleeping people who were unaware of what was going on for the course of a night.

Are they capable of transporting entire brigades down? No idea.

EDIT: There's also the trick Dukat and Kira pull off in Return to Grace, wherein they use the ship's transporters to exchange the crews of a Cardassian freighter and a Bird of Prey so that they can blow up the freighter(with the Klingons still on board) and steal the bird of prey. So there is at least on example of doing so in a combat situation.

Armed infantry, we've seen then transport redshirts. But how about vehicles? Can transporters transport machines with nuclear reactors in em?

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Voyager once beamed up an entire cryo-system supporting three people in The Thaw. They also beamed up the Delta Flyer in Once Upon a Time. Though, in both cases, this was after sending crews to investigate, and for the Delta Flyer, mining the rock with phasers to get to the ship before an ion storm beat the hell out of Voyager.

Voyager also beamed up a 1936 Ford Truck once in The 37s, but I doubt anyone would consider that complex technology.

They transport data pretty frequently. And phasers. I'm fairly certain both items are M/AM powered, with data potentially being powered by something a little less reactive given his lack of habit of blowing up and long-term survivability. But he's certainly complex and energetic

I'd bet the complexity (they transport, with relatively minimal and infrequent side effects, people all the time) is less an issue than total mass. You never see a transporter big enough to beam a tank. Dialogue more than once indicates that an active transporter consumes, at least momentarily, a not-insignificant portion of the total capacity of a M/AM-powered starship.

Additionally, "industrial replicators", presumably machines capable of using transporter tech to manufacture industrial equipment, are highly-specialized equipment worth giving up a highly-placed asset to steal and keep out of the hands of your enemy. If commonly available transporter tech was capable of transporting something like a tank, then the amount of security they place on the industrial replicator and the loss of such a valuable asset are both totally senseless.
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The takeaway for me Is that transporter tech is theoretically capable of transporting heavy equipment or armor. But that it has so much engineering cost that it is not sensible to do so except in stationary implementations with denser or more stable power supplies than starships.

I seem to recall Scotty not being sure he'd be able to pull off the whale/water beamup in the voyage home, too. But not why.

I had a Bill Maher quote here. But fuck him for his white privelegy "joke".

The requirements for transporting a tank or even some kind of small future-humvee would be way below the order of magnitude or scale required for in industrial replicators meant for something like a starship or facilities like Yorktown station in NuTrek...

I wonder if aside from stationary implementations, a dedicated weaponless, even relatively lightly shielded, slow-warp drive'd but dedicated troop transport could count as something with a dense and stable enough power supply to transport large armed and mechanized contingents... like a Galaxy-class-sized vessel but without the arms and defenses that make it tough enough to take on enemy warships... a space LHD!

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I dout it's matter complexity per say as humans (well most multi-call organism to be honest) aren't exactly simple in their "construction" and you can beam humans just fine. That said it could be that some materials are inherertly harder to transport then others. The problem is that we known practically nothing about how the transporter really works.

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Scotty said he'd 'never beamed up 400 tons before' so that indicates a mass limit. Whether that's a hard technological/physical limit or something that's not worth the bother in most situations is unclear-could be anything from excessive energy usage to wear & tear on the transporter to too much data needing to be processed. Maybe beyond a certain point it's easier to transfer materials the old-fashioned way. Plus we know there's stuff you simply cannot transport because it's too unstable. And given the range limit of transporters, landing your troops via dropship instead of beaming them down means a delay measured in single figure minutes.

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I imagine that they can transport big bulky heavy stuff if it's designed to be transported, although there may be an upper limit which forces the Federation to limit itself to stuff that can fit on a transporter pallet. Just like in real life many military supplies are designed around the need to fit in standardized cargo containers or in specific types of transport planes. That said, there may be materials you can't use in a transporter-capable vehicle, or can't use without special adjustments to the transporter. Just as, again, there are limitations and constraints on how you can design a vehicle if you want it to be air-transportable, or if you want it to survive being exposed to seawater on the deck of a transport ship, or whatever.

Have they transported bombs into enemy vessels? I vaguely remember this...

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That's pretty much the only time they've done that and even then you needed to bring down the shields before beaming in the ordanance so I suspect that against most enemies it wouldn't be worth it.

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:If transporters get messed up by radioactive rocks... does this mean they can't transport, say, an anti-matter shooting hovertank or something? How about that dune buggy in ST: Nemesis?

I ask because I'm wondering if the Federation and other equivalent powers have troop transport ships that just beam down a whole battalion of space-troopers with space-tanks and ruin their opponents' shit (after orbitally precision-blasting jamming devices) instead of "slowly" dropping them via runabouts and shuttles and other landing crafts?

Picard has ordered shuttles to be beamed directly into the shuttlebay at least once. I'll find it if you really want to know which episode. They didn't because the shuttles shields were up or it was in a star or something but there was no reason given like "lol?"

They've beamed whales before - that's a huge complex organism, way more complex than a dune buggy, and that was fine.

The Voth once beamed aboard the entire Starship Voyager...

Wesley beamed antimatter around in "Peak Performance" and Voyager's beamed torpedoes to a borg ship before.

Could they beam down a whole battalion of space-troopers? I have no idea how big a battalion is but say 1,000 people. Yeah. Not with the transporter systems of a normal starship, even a Galaxy Class starship has only 14 transporter rooms - assuming 6 at a time, 6 seconds per cycle, 3 seconds for the next lot to get up in position, that's ... heh that's 84 people every 9 seconds. 107 seconds for a Galaxy Class starship to do 1,000 people. Oh sure, add the shuttles and stuff but yes, it's going to be, at max, at absolute max, about 80-90 seconds for 1,000 people.

Could they *do* it? Sure. I can't see any reason why not on a technical level. I don't believe they *have* these, though. I could be wrong, I dunno if a Troop Transporter carrying 15,000 troops or something (some DS9 thing) has 15,000 transporter units, it's never said either way.

It's weird really. I mean Voyager makes such a big deal of landing on a planet with Blue alert and all this stuff with explosions - and that's a ship designed to enter a planetary atmosphere and land - but a 15,000 person one or something would.. what, have a 50% chance of falling out the sky?

I presume not, the Defiant could enter an atmosphere of a gas giant just doodly, but Enterprise D can't. Runabouts can though without issue.

*shrug* ?

And at the same time, why couldn't they beam 1000 people at once? A 23rd Century Bird of Prey can apparently do 400 tons at the quantum level. At 80kg a person (call it 120kg with full combat gear) that's 3.33..K people equivalent mass and scan resolution.

I don't think it's limitation of technology so much as it's a limitation of doctrine. Like we discussed in this thread there's really no reason for a large D-Day style invasions in trek. If you had orbital supremecy you'd send small teams to secure a landing zone (either by "marking" defensive positions for orbital support or dealing with the ground defensives with those teams) then land your troops at your leasure as orbital support means your landing zone will most likely remain secure.

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Lord Revan wrote:I don't think it's limitation of technology so much as it's a limitation of doctrine. Like we discussed in this thread there's really no reason for a large D-Day style invasions in trek. If you had orbital supremecy you'd send small teams to secure a landing zone (either by "marking" defensive positions for orbital support or dealing with the ground defensives with those teams) then land your troops at your leasure as orbital support means your landing zone will most likely remain secure.

This is one area where Trek falls down on the TV show. Insurrection *attempted* it, in some new ways, but nothing special.

The thing is, you ignore the planet surface for now. You need space superiority (much as today you need air superiority). Assuming you have that, then any troops on the surface are... toast? I suppose what level of destruction you want.

Those on the surface will have some sort of shielding. In "Nor the battle" and similar there are transport inhibitors and scramblers - which we can guess what they do. I presume, since Worf can make a person force field out of a combadge in "A Fistful of Datas" (that sounds like a bad porn movie) and Leyton went on about personal shield units in "Homefront" - and we also see in TNG's "Lessons" that they have large scale theatre shields (sort of like the Gungan ones in TPM in range and such) from just some make-shift equipment to stop planetary fire storms destroying a research area or something.

However, whatever it is, unless it's a military installation with heavy shielding, nothing is going to withstand a fleet in orbit using phasers. Even on "stun" setting (A Piece of the Action) they're able to be used on a planet's surface, and also in ST5 we see photon torpedoes can be dialed down to take out an individual building or structure as needed.

So really, just blast them with strong phasers on heavy stun for sustained times (assuming you're Starfleet of course lol - anyone else - just start launching phasers or disruptors at full power) and stun / kill most of them. Beam up survivors as prisoners. You now have a lovely planet to play with.

Runabouts doing strafing runs etc - shuttles... the Romulans had the Scorpion fighters (silly design as they were) - yeah I think any ground army is doomed, really.

However thanks to DS9 we also know they have armies in the millions - Damar looking to recruit people, 500,000 at a time with the right commanders. They have some sort of land army.

However that said Damar is impressed by "that's over half a million men". Not against something measuring in tens or hundreds of billions it isn't...

Federation troop transports of 15,000 at a time are super vital for key places in DS9. Again, not against a large entity it isn't.

And in Nor the Battle, at the end, all is won when the Federation gets a Nebula class ship in orbit. The fight is over instantly.

The thing to remember that there's a possibility between a "makes ground armies pointless" and "utterly useless" for orbital support, You can use limited tactical strikes to keep a landing zone secure to allow you to land troops and equipment, which in turn allow you to make the landing zone even more secure.

We got to remember that tactics always have this series or tactics and counter tactics and you're very unlikely to get a permanent "silver bullet" tactic like orbital support is often treated here. Same way neither submarines or air support didn't make convention tactics obsolete neither would orbital support, it's really just an extension of air/naval support not a "silver bullet".

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The use of ground armies as I see it is occupation and policing. Sure, you can have a ship hover over a city and threaten to stun or kill them from orbit at any time, have shuttles acting as close air support or just drive them down streets, but how do you use any ground facilities in an enemy city, get an uncooperative populace to do what you want, etc.? You need people for that.

An army of millions is pretty darn puny compared to the size of the Fed or other civilizations, too. It may sound like a lot to us, but *we* have armies in the millions, and we're one world, not a thousand. So even though it sounds plentiful, think of it as a relatively small specialized task compared to the scale you operate.

Lord Revan wrote:
We got to remember that tactics always have this series or tactics and counter tactics and you're very unlikely to get a permanent "silver bullet" tactic like orbital support is often treated here. Same way neither submarines or air support didn't make convention tactics obsolete neither would orbital support, it's really just an extension of air/naval support not a "silver bullet".

Also not much reason to think you can't make mobile ground weapons that will destroy Trek starships. It's just the more planets you have the more and more life will still favor building more starships because its just a far more flexible and strategically effective means of warfare. A ground army could be impossible strong on one planet, and yet if the solar system involved was like Sol then you'd be defending under 1% of the planetary mass of the system. Which isn't really going to win many wars at the strategic and operational level.

Stockpiling light armaments though would always be desirable as a deterrent to direct invasions. Otherwise the enemy could move forward a stage, from isolating a planet, to isolating parts of one planet, and extract resources from the surface protected from orbit, but without bothering to try to takeover any cities.

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Batman wrote:Scotty said he'd 'never beamed up 400 tons before' so that indicates a mass limit. Whether that's a hard technological/physical limit or something that's not worth the bother in most situations is unclear-could be anything from excessive energy usage to wear & tear on the transporter to too much data needing to be processed. Maybe beyond a certain point it's easier to transfer materials the old-fashioned way. Plus we know there's stuff you simply cannot transport because it's too unstable. And given the range limit of transporters, landing your troops via dropship instead of beaming them down means a delay measured in single figure minutes.

I have always gotten the impression that in addition to transporters being maintenance/power intensive technology there is also an art to it. That you have to have a real talent for understanding whats going on beyond simply a book understanding of the physics. Like being a pilot. I am not sure what factors make a particular transport difficult but given the above example volume is certainly one. From memory finicky transporter equipment and any number of energy phenomena are as well.

In any case, we often see characters who are particularly savvy at wrestling the transporter used for inst-drama on screen, including the nearly ubiquitous push aside the extra who presumably normally does it routinely so the dude with a name in the credits can do it!

Sea Skimmer wrote:
Also not much reason to think you can't make mobile ground weapons that will destroy Trek starships. It's just the more planets you have the more and more life will still favor building more starships because its just a far more flexible and strategically effective means of warfare. A ground army could be impossible strong on one planet, and yet if the solar system involved was like Sol then you'd be defending under 1% of the planetary mass of the system. Which isn't really going to win many wars at the strategic and operational level.

To note an obvious example, Runabouts can carry small torpedo launchers, which definitely are something that ships have to worry about, and which you could put on a ground vehicle as small or smaller than a Runabout.

So you could put those on ground vehicles or emplacements... or you could put them on Runabouts, and gain the ability to fly it to any planet you need it.

Q99 wrote:
To note an obvious example, Runabouts can carry small torpedo launchers, which definitely are something that ships have to worry about, and which you could put on a ground vehicle as small or smaller than a Runabout.

Runabouts have both micro torpedoes (seen in a number of episodes including One Little Ship in particular) and the added weapons rollbar can fire full size ones (but obviously not many, since they can't fit many in there).

also I'm not sure if it was ever shown in the the episodes but the federation attack fighters (the ones used in DS9 and generally assumed to be the pergrine-class) were planned to have 4 underwing mounts standard photon torps (1 torp each for a total of 4 torps) in addition to phasers and microtorps.

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